Week #8

City Exhibition

This week we had our city exhibition in J Block which required us to display our poster on an A1 panel along side our scale model of Kabul. The Exhibition was rather exciting, it was good to see the level of work that other groups were capable of achieving, and it was beneficial to speak with other students on the processes they went through to construct their scale models. Overall our entire piece of assessment was of good quality when compared to some other pieces of assessment, the photograph below shows our presentation set up.

Kabul Exhibition set up

We received our feedback for our poster and I needed to make the following adjustments before the 27th of April:

- Include Kabul in its true name

- Enlarge the image size of the traditional house and elevations of the city of light

- Reduce the size of the map of Afghanistan

- Remove the title decoration and choose one that is more suitable to Kabul

After making the above adjustments to the poster, I arrived at the following poster design for our final submission. Although I'm not overly happy with the layout of the report, I'm very happy with the way the images sit together nicely in the space provided. 

Poster redone after the exhibition

Reflections


Now that the assessment is over, my final reflection is that I now know how to analyse a city and put that information into suitable images so that the data can be compared effectively. My techniques may need improvement, but this is something that I can fine tune over a period of time and through-out my many assessment pieces that I'll complete in the not so distant future.  

Week #7

City Desires

Unfortunately I missed today's part of the lecture series, and an interesting discussion about cities from the guest lecturers. However I have seen the online podcast and managed to get a few pieces of the guest lecturer answering students questions. The questions revolved around privately owned public spaces, areas that were required to be returned to public use but don't follow public area rules. In this discussion it was mentioned that private refers to customers with public refers to citizens.
I also learnt a great deal about what can be analysed in a city using Luino in Italy as an example. Project #3 was also discussed as next week there will be no lecture because of the city exhibition and project #2 due date. 
Project #3 is a Student Negotiated Assessment that is due in week 14, we are allowed to remain with our Project #2 city choice or we can email Mirko (between the 1 and 5 of May) and ask to do Brisbane city, which is what I might do. 

Project #2 


This week our group needs to basically have the entire piece of assessment completed prior to the weekend. I've been left in charge of assembling the poster and considering a layout for the report, while the rest of the group works on constructing the model in J block this Friday. 
The poster layout has been rather difficult to assemble due to the various sizes that are needed for certain elements and the amount of text from the report, as well as a general lack of time due to group members not sending their contributions. Another major issue was trying to enlarge the images without causing too much distortion in the process. The completed design can be seen below, this was printed and placed on a panel ready for the exhibition on Monday.

Poster used for City Exhibition

Reflections


This week has been a nightmare, I have two other pieces of university assessment due as well as numerous rostered days at work, I've emailed the team regarding my concerns and hopefully Friday we can help each other complete the report and model. 
One thing I regret about this assignment is not having most of the major components finished or drafted prior to tutorial sessions. If we were better prepared we could have received valuable feedback from Helena on our images and report. As it stands I'm rather worried about the content of the poster which is basically worth 80% of our marks for project #2.

Week #6

Around the world in 8 Cities

Today's lecture discussed a variety of cities and previous examples completed by past design students. After today I have a good idea of what is expected from us for our poster in project #2 and how our scale models should be done.

Things to consider are:

- Report has no word limit

- Nolli map is required (week 3)

- Urban environment investigation (weeks 1 to 4)

- Images sized according to importance

- Blackboard readings should be incorporated and referenced

- Monuments etc should be highlighted
- 1:1000 model (600x600)
- A1 landscape poster

Project #2 Group Work

Today as a group we distributed further research and poster components between each other, with a goal of completing the majority of the A1 panel by next Monday. The remaining part of the panel (report) will be left until after the model construction has begun.

The tasks were divided as follows:

- Blair: Complete Nolli map of our selected area

- Angela: Street sections of both new and old parts of the city

- Alan: Timeline, historical analysis maps

- Myself: Poster layout and any additional components

I begun work on designing the poster straight away, sketching out rough layouts for the A1 panel as can be seen in the image below.

As the week progressed I continued work on the poster template and have arrived at the design shown below. This design will inevitably change over the coming weeks as the team sends me the nolli maps, timeline and other imagery. 

Reflections

This week has been much slower than I would have liked, I haven't heard anything from the group members, and I haven't received any images to contribute to the poster. The lecture from this week has further reinforced my previous reflection from week #5 about the layouts of cities and where their original inspiration came from. We looked at Roman, Spanish, American and British styles and how they were analysed and applied to other cities. Today we looked at 8 different cities across the globe, and while most of them had certain elements that could be directly related back to the 4 different designs, a lot of them were a combination or seemed to follow more dominating influences such as the landscape or transport hubs. Its seems that this idea of categorising cities is a lot more complicated then first thought.